Neuropuncture™ Case Studies and Clinical Applications: Volume 1

By Dr. Michael D. Corradino and Dr. Helen K. Law

Neuropuncture is the only complete neuroscience acupuncture system in the world that has been created by a traditionally trained acupuncturist for the traditionally trained acupuncturist and anyone else who wants to learn how to apply twenty-first-century medical sciences to the classical acupuncture model, in an effort to bring acupuncture into

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neuropuncture Inc.
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780989384629

Dr. Michael D. Corradino

Michael Corradino, MSTOM, DAOM, AP Dr. Michael Corradino has been studying traditional Chinese medicine and the science of acupuncture for the past thirty years. He has been in the field of integrated acupuncture and clinically practicing for the past twenty-five years. He has owned clinics on campuses of hospitals, has worked in integrated pain centers alongside medical doctors, and has been the director of integrated medicine for chemical dependency centers. He was in the first graduating class in the country to receive the Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. After traveling to China with the late Alex Tiberi in 2006, he began working on his first Neuropuncture Workbook. Since then, Dr. Corradino has published two Neuropuncture clinical manuals (first and second editions), has published research, and has been involved in several neuroscience electroacupuncture research projects. He has traveled to China to further investigate AAA (acupuncture-assisted anesthesia) and has been flown around the world to teach Neuropuncture. Now this will be the third Neuropuncture book. Dr. Corradino has been studying and clinically applying neuroscience acupuncture research throughout his professional career. He is a firm believer that we and our profession at large must embrace and apply twenty-first-century medical sciences to our medicine in order for it to thrive. He continues to be involved in groundbreaking electroacupuncture research to this date and is constantly improving his Neuropuncture system. Neuropuncture is his professional lifelong work, and he is proud to have had the courage to bring this to his profession and now witness the amazing impact it has had not only on the profession but also on practitioners and their patients worldwide. Dr. Corradino is excited to now offer Level One Clinical Neuropuncture certifications and Neuropuncture Instructor Certifications and will soon offer an internationally accredited OMD-Neuropuncture degree.

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FOREWORD

The foundations of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) have been traced back to the third millennium BC, a time when disease was believed to be the result of demonic and spiritual forces. Between the fifth and third centuries BC, the Huangdi Neijing, the most important historical text on Chinese medicine, was composed, replacing such shamanistic beliefs with theories incorporating diet, environment, and age as factors contributing to health. It organized the framework of yin and yang and qi and the five elements and continues to prove influential as a reference work for practitioners of TCM well into the modern era (Curan 2008). Today, the practice has greatly expanded and is used by a quarter of the world’s population across the globe, with more than ten million acupuncture treatments administered annually in the United States alone. Its rise in popularity, particularly in the West, can be attributed in part to its effectiveness for pain relief and in part to a rapidly increasing body of scientific research that supports its efficacy (Hao and Mittelman 2014).

Having been raised in a family of highly respected traditional Chinese medicine physicians in Hong Kong, acupuncture has always been a large part of my life. However, I did not initially follow in their footsteps. I took a detour and studied aerospace engineering and computer science, leading to a long career in aerospace research at Princeton University. But something was always calling me back, and I eventually responded to my calling as a doctor of Chinese medicine. In the twenty years since starting my acupuncture practice, it has become my passion, and I have never once looked back. It is a fascinating art and science in that the more you learn, the more you want to learn. I have studied many different methods and styles of acupuncture, approaching it conceptually from all angles. In the clinic, each method has shown its strengths, and the mastery of fluidly employing each when called for has led to a continuously expanding repertoire of conditions I have been able to successfully improve. However, I have never stopped asking the question: How do we explain all these different approaches with one theory?

Instinctually, I have always believed acupuncture to be a type of neuroscience. I even called myself an Acupuncture Neurologist. But after years of following the research that linked acupuncture to neuroscience, I was still unable to find a systematic approach that clearly explained the neurophysiology mechanisms of acupuncture. That is, until I met Dr. Michael Corradino. I attended Dr. Corradino’s first workshop in June of 2019 and immediately recognized it as the framework I had been searching for. Dr. Corradino presented a complete neuroscience acupuncture system he calls Neuropuncture. He built largely on fifty years of research by Dr. Ji-sheng Han and Dr. Corradino’s understandings and investigations into neuroscience and neurophysiology. Dr. Ji-sheng Han in 1940 began studying the connection between neuroscience and electrical acupuncture in the endorphin arena. The methodology of Neuropuncture combines the research of electrical acupuncture’s effects on specific neural receptors by investigating Western medical sciences and integrating them with the holistic TCM framework. Furthermore, Dr. Corradino created the treatment prescriptions that are patent-pending, evidence-based, and clinically reproducible.

The one question my patients ask more than any other is this: How does acupuncture work? I would always answer the conventional way, explaining that qi or vital energy flows along the twelve meridians in the body. Blockages in this flow resulted in illness. Acupuncture worked by removing these blockages, hence creating the balance and harmony of energy within the body. While this model still has much to offer us, the terminology and conceptual framework does not align with that of twenty-first-century medical sciences and thus is easy to misinterpret within a different paradigm. Furthermore, collaboration with a patient’s Western-medicine physicians is limited due to this incompatibility of language and ideas. Neuropuncture has removed many of these barriers, bridging the chasm that has, for so long, separated Eastern and Western medical thought.

In 2012, Dr. Corradino laid the foundation of Neuropuncture in his first book, Neuropuncture: A Clinical Handbook of Neuroscience Acupuncture. Dr. Corradino published his second edition of Neuropuncture in 2017 and has been involved in groundbreaking electrical acupuncture research since 2010. I now feel that it is time to present to the world the clinical impact Neuropuncture has provided to our practitioners and their patients worldwide. In this book, we build on the theory through examination of real case studies. The content includes the commonly seen clinical conditions. Case studies were clinically performed in various clinics all over the world, utilizing strictly Neuropuncture theory and prescriptions. The purpose of this book is to increase the understanding of students who are interested in learning this Neuropuncture system. Additionally, it is our hope that this book will also influence Western medical doctors and help to introduce this system to them in a language that they are familiar with and help to bridge the gap between these two medical systems in a seamless fashion.

Ever since incorporating the Neuropuncture system into my practice, I’ve found that it has not only become a treatment protocol I turn to on a daily basis, but it also sheds new light on every other technique I continue to employ. Within its neurophysiological framework, I am able to quickly identify the causes of my patients’ complaints and devise treatment prescriptions that have shown remarkable results in record time. Many of these fascinating and complex cases and their resolutions are presented, in detail, in this book. Neuropuncture has added great value to my practice and sparked a fresh perspective that I am just beginning to explore more deeply and want to share with you. I believe Neuropuncture is leading the way to the future of acupuncture medicine, integrating the wisdom of the East with the science of the West.

Dr. Corradino’s passion and enthusiasm are contagious; his knowledge, experience, and intuition are second to none. I am so fortunate to have had the opportunity to study with him, and I’m thrilled to collaborate with him in the writing of this book.

Helen Law

Princeton, New Jersey 2020

References

Curan, J., Locum, GP & Glasgow. 2008. Review: The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine. The BMJ 336(7647) (April 5): 777. https://www.ncbi. nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2287209/

Hao, J.J. and Mittelman, M. 2014. Acupuncture: Past, Present, and Future. Global Advances in Health and Medicine 3, no. 4 (July).

Ulett, G.A., Han, S., & Han, JS. Electroacupuncture: Mechanisms and Clinical Application. BIOL. PSYCHIATRY. 1998,44:129-138.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my most heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Michael Corradino for giving me the opportunity to collaborate with him on the writing of Neuropuncture Case Studies: Volume 1. In working closely with him, I was able to dive deeply into the critical analysis of neuropathophysiology, forever changing my practice and my understanding of the human body. I also wish to thank all the Neuropuncture practitioners who shared their cases and experience. This collection is a testament of their generosity and community spirit.

Finally, none of this would have been possible without my family. Their encouragement and support throughout the COVID-19 pandemic allowed me to focus on this project. My special thanks to my son, Jeffrey Law, for our many discussions, which helped me organize my ideas.

Dr. Helen Law

It has been my absolute pleasure and honor to have worked with Dr. Helen Law on this collaboration, and I would like to sincerely thank her for her hard work, her family’s sacrifice, and her vision on this project. She is truly an amazing person and a very special practitioner, and it fills my heart with emotion to see her commitment to Neuropuncture. After all, it was her idea for me to bring a book of Neuropuncture case studies to the world to illustrate Neuropuncture’s clinical effectiveness and Neuropuncture’s twenty-first-century medical applications. I also would like to extend a very special thank you to mia Bambina, Ana for all her patience, support, and hours of her time in the professional design work and layout of this book. I so very much appreciate you and your amazing talent, and I thank you for all your time, energy, and love in this project, once again.

Throughout this COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to use our time to compile and present these cases from my NeuroLab members around the world. So, I would also like to thank all of them for their dedication, understanding, commitment, and discipline in learning